RLI Returned
30-07-2006, 17:12
This is an old article but I recently rediscovered it and I wondered how accurate it was. Given that all the knowledge in the world eventually gravitates to NS General I thought I'd post it here for comment:
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
October 26, 2003, Sunday
The scene is Nuremberg's Palace of Justice on September 7, 1948, an overcast day that allows only a glimmer of sunshine to pierce the courtroom's grime-smeared windows. Although the major Nazi war criminals have long since been convicted and hanged, the trial of their willing helpers continues. A US War Crimes' Prosecutor is interrogating one Fritz Wiedemann: Adolf Hitler's commanding officer in the First World War.
Referring to the dictator's service in the trenches, the prosecutor asks: "Can you tell us why Hitler never received promotion?"
Laughter isn't common in the Palace of Justice, but Wiedemann's response leaves the court convulsed with mirth. Hitler, he says, with a shrug, simply lacked the personality to be a leader. Later Weidemann recalled: "They found it amusing when I told them that. But it was true. When I first knew Hitler he lacked any leadership qualities at all."
This brief exchange encapsulates one of the most curious and, until now, unexplained mysteries surrounding Hitler's rise to power. By what strange alchemy was a failed art student and purposeless drifter, whose total absence of leadership abilities during the First World War was so obvious to his superiors, transformed into a man whose unshakeable conviction in his own divinely inspired destiny would transform the course of world history?
This much seems to be true and is confirmed in 'Nazi Germany: A Critical Introduction' by Martin Kitchen.
The desire to solve that conundrum lies behind my personal quest to uncover the remarkable story of Dr Edmund Forster, an eminent German psychiatrist and highly decorated First World War medical officer, who believed himself to be "the man who invented Hitler". As a psychiatrist myself, I am aware this is a highly controversial claim. Yet the more I discovered about the methods used to treat so-called 'hysterical' soldiers during the First World War, and the more I unearthed about Forster's life, work and violent death, the more convinced I became.
Dr Forster's speciality during the war was curing those suffering from "shell shock". Sometime between October 21 and November 19, 1918, in a small military hospital in Pasewalk, Pomerania, he treated a young soldier invalided from the Western Front. Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler could not see and was in despair.
Hitler was certain he had been blinded in a gas attack, but his eyes showed no signs of serious physical damage. Everyone who examined him became convinced that his blindness was "not physical but hysterical in origin".
Hitler had been referred to Dr Forster, the hospital's leading psychiatrist, specifically for treatment for his hysteria. After one examination, Dr Forster had concluded that his colleagues were right. To the doctor that meant one of two things: the patient was either malingering; or he simply "lacked the willpower" to recover.
Dr Forster was a disciple of Fritz Kaufmann, the toweringly influential German psychiatrist who conceived of psychiatric cures as a battle of wills between doctor and patient: a battle which the patient had to understand that he could not win. Kaufmann had pioneered the use of electric shocks for the treatment of "weak nerves" - a treatment that was eventually banned at the end of the war, but not before more than 20 people had been killed through its use.
Although Dr Forster, like his mentor, resorted to electric shocks on occasions, he preferred to attempt to dominate patients through the force of his personality. Even in Germany during the First World War, some of his colleagues thought he had a tendency to "proceed a little too roughly, attributing his own willpower to others and imposing it on them".
He himself said that, in cases where he diagnosed his patients' disability as "self-inflicted", he used a technique which involved talking to them as if they were "whiny children and opportunistic malingerers", explaining that they were neither sick nor suffering from any physical complaint, and that their behaviour was "so unworthy of a German soldier that it made them more deserving of punishment than treatment".
Dr Forster liked to vary his "therapeutic script" according to the patient's personality, but in all cases the essence of his technique was the same: he used his overpowering personality to bully his patients back to health. "With a little bit of willpower," he would say, "you could perform your duties. You are not here because you are poorly, but because you have been badly brought up and have no willpower. This willpower has to be 'strengthened'." He claimed that in most cases, this led the patient to make "a complete recovery". Certainly, he received many letters from grateful patients. He claimed that the more abusive and verbally brutal he had been, the greater the gratitude.
Lance-Corporal Hitler presented Dr Forster with a new problem. Hitler was clearly hysterical: he could not sleep, and spent the nights alternately raving about Jews and Marxists and bewailing his own fate. He whined continually about what would become of "artists" like himself after the war was over. He was terrified that once he was discharged, he would quickly be reduced to beggary. Yet, at the same time, it was obvious the lance-corporal was not a "malingerer": on the contrary, he was only too eager to join his comrades at the Front. Dr Forster could not "shame" him into recovering sufficiently to return to the war, because that was exactly what his patient most wanted to do.
After observing Hitler for a week, Dr Forster decided to try a radical new technique. He would deceive his patient, telling him his blindness was not "hysterical" but physical in origin. He would cure it by convincing Hitler that he had been chosen by God, and that his sight would be returned by a "miracle" - if only Hitler would make the effort to see. So in the first week of November 1918, in the final few days of the German Imperial Reich, Dr Forster deliberately lied to the "blind man" slumped in front of him.
His initial diagnosis had been wrong, Dr Forster told Hitler. "I should never have assumed a pure German, a good soldier with an Iron Cross, First Class, would lie or deceive." There was now no doubt, the doctor continued, that mustard gas had caused irreparable damage to Hitler's eyes and, unfortunately, he would never see again.
Dr Forster turned off the light, and continued speaking. In spite of the physical cause of his injury, and in spite of the usual prognosis of life-long blindness, there was a faint chance that Hitler could see again. It was of course true that any "normal" man would be condemned to blindness by the injuries that Hitler had. There remained, however, the possibility that an extraordinary individual, a man of destiny chosen by a higher power for some divine purpose, might overcome an obstacle as great as this. "Miracles," he said, "do happen to chosen people. There have to be miracles and great people before whom nature bows. For a person with exceptional strength of willpower and spiritual energy there are no limits: scientific assumptions do not apply. The spirit removes any such barrier."
Dr Forster then added rather prosaically that, "in your case, the barrier is the thick white layer on your cornea . . . but maybe," he continued, "you do not possess the power to perform miracles. Do you trust yourself to my willpower?' He then held up two candles in front of Hitler's eyes. Did Hitler see them? If he did, it would be absolute proof both of his unique qualities as a human being and his God-given destiny to lead Germany to victory.
Unfortunately, Hitler wasn't sure whether he did or not. He thought he saw patches of light but . . . "That's not enough!" barked Dr Forster. He stood close to Hitler's sightless eyes and urged him to "have absolute faith in yourself. Then you will stop being blind. Gather all your strength. More, more, more! Now it is enough. What do you see?"
Hitler reported that he could see Dr Forster's face, his beard, his hand, his signet ring, his white coat, the newspaper on the table, the notes. It was extraordinary, but . . . but he was cured! "Sit down," said Dr Forster. "You have behaved like a man and you have managed to put light into your eyes because of your willpower."
There can be no doubt that Hitler was completely taken in by Dr Forster's little charade. His sight was wholly restored. "Everything happened as I wanted it to," Forster later recalled. "I had played God and given back sight to a blind insomniac."
On November 19, with the war a week over, Hitler was discharged and sent back to rejoin his regiment in Munich. But the longer he dwelt on the meaning of the "miracle" he believed had taken place, the clearer it became to him that his miraculous escapes during the war - he had been wounded only once in four years of intense fighting - must have been ordained by the same providence which now commanded him to lead Germany to glory.
By all accounts, the aimless, indecisive character who lacked any focus and all "leadership qualities" had disappeared. Hitler stayed on in the army after the war, working in the "political intelligence unit" established to gather information on the various extreme groups that were set up in the aftermath of Germany's defeat. In 1919, still in the army, he would visit a meeting of the German Workers Party (soon to be renamed the Nazis). At that meeting, he got up to speak - and did so with exceptional passion, clarity and confidence. He was immediately invited to join the party, and, with the astonishing power of his oratory, was soon its greatest asset.
Hitler's change from tongue-tied and gauche outsider - unable to do anything but dither, or obey orders - into this focused orator who never had the slightest doubt about what he would say or which course of action to follow, was an extraordinary, unprecedented transformation. It is one which I believe cannot be explained without understanding the cataclysmic effects that Dr Forster's "noble lie" had on Hitler.
Hitler himself later insisted that he had been "divinely inspired" when he was in the Pasewalk hospital, and that his decision to enter politics dated from that moment. He did not know the full truth: that he had been conned by Dr Forster while suffering from a form of breakdown. Nazism, with its grotesque cult of invincible masculinity, heaped contempt on all "hysterics", insisting they were "useless eaters", scarcely fit to live. It would have been an impossible, unutterable humiliation for Hitler ever to have had to admit that he had actually been one of those "useless eaters" himself.
Dr Forster, of course, knew what had really happened. As Hitler became increasingly prominent in German politics during the early Thirties, Dr Forster became ever more alarmed at the Frankenstein monster that his treatment had created. He hated Hitler's ideology: many of his close friends were Jewish, and he regarded Hitler's prescriptions for reviving German greatness with contempt. In his medical notes, he knew he had a weapon with which he could severely damage Hitler. Yet his medical oath prevented him from divulging the contents - never mind the risk to his personal safety if he did so. The Nazis had made it clear they were willing to murder anyone they thought stood in their way.
In 1933, soon after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and set about dismantling the rule of law, Dr Forster - now a Professor and the head of the Nerve Hospital at Greifswald University - decided to act. He made three copies of his medical notes on Hitler. He deposited one in a bank vault in Basel - it has never been found - and gave two others to dissident writers living in Paris. Only one of these writers, a well-known German Czech novelist named Ernest Weiss, was to make use of the information, incorporating Dr Forster's notes into The Eyewitness, a novel in which a doctor treats a patient who is suffering from hysterical blindness. The patient is known only by his initials: AH.
Only weeks after smuggling the medical notes out of Germany, Dr Forster was denounced for embezzlement of hospital funds, and for debauching the nurses. No evidence was found for either charge, but even so Dr Forster was warned he would be dismissed from his post and charged with having "slandered the Fuhrer". His body, with a bullet through the head, was found in his bathroom on September 11, 1933. There was no police investigation: the "fact" of his suicide was accepted without question by the authorities. There is little doubt in my mind that he shared the same fate as many hundreds of professors, journalists, lawyers and politicians whom the Nazis thought might be inconvenient: he was murdered by the Gestapo.
Hitler's secret remained safe. The smuggled out notes never surfaced. And even Weiss's novel The Eyewitness - written in 1938 and entered for a literary competition for German emigre writers organised by a committee in New York - was not brought out during Hitler's lifetime. Indeed, it languished in a filing cabinet until 1963, when it was published as a piece of fiction with no hint of its historical background.
Dr Forster died believing that he was responsible for creating the most evil man of the 20th century. He may have had a premonition of the millions of lives that would be sacrificed to feed the mad ambitions of the blind, shell-shocked hysteric that he had cured. He certainly suspected what his own fate would be: "If you hear in a short time that I have committed suicide," he told his friends in Paris, as he handed over the copies of Hitler's medical file, "don't believe it."
The Man Who Invented Hitler, by David Lewis (Headline), is available for pounds 18 plus pounds 2.25 p&p. To order please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.
By David Lewis
Is this story believable or is this just the DaVinci Code with Nazis?
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
October 26, 2003, Sunday
The scene is Nuremberg's Palace of Justice on September 7, 1948, an overcast day that allows only a glimmer of sunshine to pierce the courtroom's grime-smeared windows. Although the major Nazi war criminals have long since been convicted and hanged, the trial of their willing helpers continues. A US War Crimes' Prosecutor is interrogating one Fritz Wiedemann: Adolf Hitler's commanding officer in the First World War.
Referring to the dictator's service in the trenches, the prosecutor asks: "Can you tell us why Hitler never received promotion?"
Laughter isn't common in the Palace of Justice, but Wiedemann's response leaves the court convulsed with mirth. Hitler, he says, with a shrug, simply lacked the personality to be a leader. Later Weidemann recalled: "They found it amusing when I told them that. But it was true. When I first knew Hitler he lacked any leadership qualities at all."
This brief exchange encapsulates one of the most curious and, until now, unexplained mysteries surrounding Hitler's rise to power. By what strange alchemy was a failed art student and purposeless drifter, whose total absence of leadership abilities during the First World War was so obvious to his superiors, transformed into a man whose unshakeable conviction in his own divinely inspired destiny would transform the course of world history?
This much seems to be true and is confirmed in 'Nazi Germany: A Critical Introduction' by Martin Kitchen.
The desire to solve that conundrum lies behind my personal quest to uncover the remarkable story of Dr Edmund Forster, an eminent German psychiatrist and highly decorated First World War medical officer, who believed himself to be "the man who invented Hitler". As a psychiatrist myself, I am aware this is a highly controversial claim. Yet the more I discovered about the methods used to treat so-called 'hysterical' soldiers during the First World War, and the more I unearthed about Forster's life, work and violent death, the more convinced I became.
Dr Forster's speciality during the war was curing those suffering from "shell shock". Sometime between October 21 and November 19, 1918, in a small military hospital in Pasewalk, Pomerania, he treated a young soldier invalided from the Western Front. Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler could not see and was in despair.
Hitler was certain he had been blinded in a gas attack, but his eyes showed no signs of serious physical damage. Everyone who examined him became convinced that his blindness was "not physical but hysterical in origin".
Hitler had been referred to Dr Forster, the hospital's leading psychiatrist, specifically for treatment for his hysteria. After one examination, Dr Forster had concluded that his colleagues were right. To the doctor that meant one of two things: the patient was either malingering; or he simply "lacked the willpower" to recover.
Dr Forster was a disciple of Fritz Kaufmann, the toweringly influential German psychiatrist who conceived of psychiatric cures as a battle of wills between doctor and patient: a battle which the patient had to understand that he could not win. Kaufmann had pioneered the use of electric shocks for the treatment of "weak nerves" - a treatment that was eventually banned at the end of the war, but not before more than 20 people had been killed through its use.
Although Dr Forster, like his mentor, resorted to electric shocks on occasions, he preferred to attempt to dominate patients through the force of his personality. Even in Germany during the First World War, some of his colleagues thought he had a tendency to "proceed a little too roughly, attributing his own willpower to others and imposing it on them".
He himself said that, in cases where he diagnosed his patients' disability as "self-inflicted", he used a technique which involved talking to them as if they were "whiny children and opportunistic malingerers", explaining that they were neither sick nor suffering from any physical complaint, and that their behaviour was "so unworthy of a German soldier that it made them more deserving of punishment than treatment".
Dr Forster liked to vary his "therapeutic script" according to the patient's personality, but in all cases the essence of his technique was the same: he used his overpowering personality to bully his patients back to health. "With a little bit of willpower," he would say, "you could perform your duties. You are not here because you are poorly, but because you have been badly brought up and have no willpower. This willpower has to be 'strengthened'." He claimed that in most cases, this led the patient to make "a complete recovery". Certainly, he received many letters from grateful patients. He claimed that the more abusive and verbally brutal he had been, the greater the gratitude.
Lance-Corporal Hitler presented Dr Forster with a new problem. Hitler was clearly hysterical: he could not sleep, and spent the nights alternately raving about Jews and Marxists and bewailing his own fate. He whined continually about what would become of "artists" like himself after the war was over. He was terrified that once he was discharged, he would quickly be reduced to beggary. Yet, at the same time, it was obvious the lance-corporal was not a "malingerer": on the contrary, he was only too eager to join his comrades at the Front. Dr Forster could not "shame" him into recovering sufficiently to return to the war, because that was exactly what his patient most wanted to do.
After observing Hitler for a week, Dr Forster decided to try a radical new technique. He would deceive his patient, telling him his blindness was not "hysterical" but physical in origin. He would cure it by convincing Hitler that he had been chosen by God, and that his sight would be returned by a "miracle" - if only Hitler would make the effort to see. So in the first week of November 1918, in the final few days of the German Imperial Reich, Dr Forster deliberately lied to the "blind man" slumped in front of him.
His initial diagnosis had been wrong, Dr Forster told Hitler. "I should never have assumed a pure German, a good soldier with an Iron Cross, First Class, would lie or deceive." There was now no doubt, the doctor continued, that mustard gas had caused irreparable damage to Hitler's eyes and, unfortunately, he would never see again.
Dr Forster turned off the light, and continued speaking. In spite of the physical cause of his injury, and in spite of the usual prognosis of life-long blindness, there was a faint chance that Hitler could see again. It was of course true that any "normal" man would be condemned to blindness by the injuries that Hitler had. There remained, however, the possibility that an extraordinary individual, a man of destiny chosen by a higher power for some divine purpose, might overcome an obstacle as great as this. "Miracles," he said, "do happen to chosen people. There have to be miracles and great people before whom nature bows. For a person with exceptional strength of willpower and spiritual energy there are no limits: scientific assumptions do not apply. The spirit removes any such barrier."
Dr Forster then added rather prosaically that, "in your case, the barrier is the thick white layer on your cornea . . . but maybe," he continued, "you do not possess the power to perform miracles. Do you trust yourself to my willpower?' He then held up two candles in front of Hitler's eyes. Did Hitler see them? If he did, it would be absolute proof both of his unique qualities as a human being and his God-given destiny to lead Germany to victory.
Unfortunately, Hitler wasn't sure whether he did or not. He thought he saw patches of light but . . . "That's not enough!" barked Dr Forster. He stood close to Hitler's sightless eyes and urged him to "have absolute faith in yourself. Then you will stop being blind. Gather all your strength. More, more, more! Now it is enough. What do you see?"
Hitler reported that he could see Dr Forster's face, his beard, his hand, his signet ring, his white coat, the newspaper on the table, the notes. It was extraordinary, but . . . but he was cured! "Sit down," said Dr Forster. "You have behaved like a man and you have managed to put light into your eyes because of your willpower."
There can be no doubt that Hitler was completely taken in by Dr Forster's little charade. His sight was wholly restored. "Everything happened as I wanted it to," Forster later recalled. "I had played God and given back sight to a blind insomniac."
On November 19, with the war a week over, Hitler was discharged and sent back to rejoin his regiment in Munich. But the longer he dwelt on the meaning of the "miracle" he believed had taken place, the clearer it became to him that his miraculous escapes during the war - he had been wounded only once in four years of intense fighting - must have been ordained by the same providence which now commanded him to lead Germany to glory.
By all accounts, the aimless, indecisive character who lacked any focus and all "leadership qualities" had disappeared. Hitler stayed on in the army after the war, working in the "political intelligence unit" established to gather information on the various extreme groups that were set up in the aftermath of Germany's defeat. In 1919, still in the army, he would visit a meeting of the German Workers Party (soon to be renamed the Nazis). At that meeting, he got up to speak - and did so with exceptional passion, clarity and confidence. He was immediately invited to join the party, and, with the astonishing power of his oratory, was soon its greatest asset.
Hitler's change from tongue-tied and gauche outsider - unable to do anything but dither, or obey orders - into this focused orator who never had the slightest doubt about what he would say or which course of action to follow, was an extraordinary, unprecedented transformation. It is one which I believe cannot be explained without understanding the cataclysmic effects that Dr Forster's "noble lie" had on Hitler.
Hitler himself later insisted that he had been "divinely inspired" when he was in the Pasewalk hospital, and that his decision to enter politics dated from that moment. He did not know the full truth: that he had been conned by Dr Forster while suffering from a form of breakdown. Nazism, with its grotesque cult of invincible masculinity, heaped contempt on all "hysterics", insisting they were "useless eaters", scarcely fit to live. It would have been an impossible, unutterable humiliation for Hitler ever to have had to admit that he had actually been one of those "useless eaters" himself.
Dr Forster, of course, knew what had really happened. As Hitler became increasingly prominent in German politics during the early Thirties, Dr Forster became ever more alarmed at the Frankenstein monster that his treatment had created. He hated Hitler's ideology: many of his close friends were Jewish, and he regarded Hitler's prescriptions for reviving German greatness with contempt. In his medical notes, he knew he had a weapon with which he could severely damage Hitler. Yet his medical oath prevented him from divulging the contents - never mind the risk to his personal safety if he did so. The Nazis had made it clear they were willing to murder anyone they thought stood in their way.
In 1933, soon after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and set about dismantling the rule of law, Dr Forster - now a Professor and the head of the Nerve Hospital at Greifswald University - decided to act. He made three copies of his medical notes on Hitler. He deposited one in a bank vault in Basel - it has never been found - and gave two others to dissident writers living in Paris. Only one of these writers, a well-known German Czech novelist named Ernest Weiss, was to make use of the information, incorporating Dr Forster's notes into The Eyewitness, a novel in which a doctor treats a patient who is suffering from hysterical blindness. The patient is known only by his initials: AH.
Only weeks after smuggling the medical notes out of Germany, Dr Forster was denounced for embezzlement of hospital funds, and for debauching the nurses. No evidence was found for either charge, but even so Dr Forster was warned he would be dismissed from his post and charged with having "slandered the Fuhrer". His body, with a bullet through the head, was found in his bathroom on September 11, 1933. There was no police investigation: the "fact" of his suicide was accepted without question by the authorities. There is little doubt in my mind that he shared the same fate as many hundreds of professors, journalists, lawyers and politicians whom the Nazis thought might be inconvenient: he was murdered by the Gestapo.
Hitler's secret remained safe. The smuggled out notes never surfaced. And even Weiss's novel The Eyewitness - written in 1938 and entered for a literary competition for German emigre writers organised by a committee in New York - was not brought out during Hitler's lifetime. Indeed, it languished in a filing cabinet until 1963, when it was published as a piece of fiction with no hint of its historical background.
Dr Forster died believing that he was responsible for creating the most evil man of the 20th century. He may have had a premonition of the millions of lives that would be sacrificed to feed the mad ambitions of the blind, shell-shocked hysteric that he had cured. He certainly suspected what his own fate would be: "If you hear in a short time that I have committed suicide," he told his friends in Paris, as he handed over the copies of Hitler's medical file, "don't believe it."
The Man Who Invented Hitler, by David Lewis (Headline), is available for pounds 18 plus pounds 2.25 p&p. To order please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.
By David Lewis
Is this story believable or is this just the DaVinci Code with Nazis?